We are seven home cooks. Fifty two weeks. Sharing one special weekly ingredient. With the Flavor Bible for reference, we will create 360 unique, fresh and seasonal dishes. Blogging and Face Booking every day. Join us!

We are seven home cooks. Fifty two weeks. Sharing one special weekly ingredient. With the Flavor Bible for reference, we will create 360 unique, fresh and seasonal dishes. Blogging and Face Booking every day. Join us!

About Deborah

Deborah is a wife, mother, grandmother, traveler, bootlegger, and a very poor speller!
As Victor Hazan so eloquently puts it, Deborah has chosen Umbria to be the home of her soul. When she can’t be there in body, she spends her free time cooking & reading about Italy. She blogs mostly about food and about trips – past and future –
here: Old Shoes New Trip.

About Cindy

Cindy lives in Eagle River, Alaska where her freezer is always full of salmon, halibut & shrimp. Cindy participates in several regular cooking challenges. You can read more about her cooking and life in the last frontier on her blog, Baked Alaska.

About Jan

Jan is a serious home cook who loves to read recipes and then do her own thing. Her focus is ingredient driven comfort food, often with an Italian influence. She is passionate about all things Italian, especially the cuisine & the language. Jan blogs about food and travels (next trip to Italy: May/June of 2012) at: Keep your Feet in the Street.

About Palma

Palma is a Marriage & Family Therapist in Palm Desert, CA. She’s an Italian-American with a passion for cooking, entertaining, & travel to Italy. She’s always planning her next culinary adventure to Italia on her blog, Palmabella's Passions

About Sandi

Sandi is a true Southerner, but a traveler & Italian cook at heart. She lives in Alabama and knows more about fried green tomatoes than fricassees. Her family owned the WhistleStop Café for many years. Sandi also blogs at Whistlestop Cafe Cooking.

About Jerry

Jerry is a food obsessed Canadian. He learned to love Italian food as a child while eating the meals prepared by his Napolitano uncle. He learned to cook Italian foods by watching his uncle cook these feasts for the family. This love of Italian food has been honed through serious personal experimentation in eating and cooking. Willing to try most anything once, Jerry isn't so sure about tripe! Jerry also blogs at Jerry's Thoughts, Musings, and Rants!

Our Subs

About Beth

Beth, along with her husband, Mike, is co-owner of two Italian Deli/Markets in St. Louis - Viviano’s Festa Italiano. When not creating yummy new menu items for the deli, she’s the pediatric research lab supervisor at Washington University School of Medicine.
Read more out about Viviano’s Festa Italiano.

About Amy

Amy is a teacher in suburban Boston with far too many cookbooks, her Grandmother's meat grinder and canning jars, and a new Wolf stove. She appreciates cuisines from around the world, with a particular fondness for French, Moroccan, Italian, Vietnamese, and Indian cooking. Tweaking her cooking and eating habits resulted long-lasting weight loss and health benefits, proving that living well still tastes good. An old hobby is knitting; and a newer one is canning preserves.
Read more from Amy on her blog, Destination Anywhere.

Pumpkin (aka Winter Squash) Beer Muffins

Right off the bat, I'm confessing, first I took a short cut this week. A short cut, because I actually created this recipe a few months ago (and posted it somewhere else), when pumpkin beer was "in season." Yes, there is a season for pumpkin beer which is usually brewed in the summer and distributed starting at the end of July/August. So if you want to have some during the actual "pumpkin season" you must buy it then and then save it as I did.

I also used a short cut, in that like those brewers of beer, I used canned not fresh pumpkin. Now let me digress for a moment as I share with you a canned pumpkin story.

Did you know that all the Libby's (maybe others too) canned pumpkin in this country (well, at least as of 20+ years ago), comes from roughly two plants - one in Illinois (Morton to be exact) and the other in California. These plants operate only for 12 weeks a year, during pumpkin harvesting season, and you can see trucks laden with pumpkins rolling down the highways towards them in the morning and leaving empty later in the day. Those pumpkins are brought into the plants in the morning and within a few hours are cooked, canned, sealed and labeled for shipment. I know this because I toured that plant in Morton Illinois many years ago when I worked as a consultant. Anyway, my point is I feel confident using canned (unflavored) pumpkin as an acceptable (and easy) substitute to fresh.

So now on with the recipe (oh and because I did create this recipe a while ago, sorry no ingredient shot - shoot me).

Bake at 375F for 20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack for 5 minutes, then remove and cool for as long as you can possibly wait to eat them. This will make 20 muffins.

Now I’m not going to lie, the house had an odd smell while these baked – I’m assuming because of the beer. And there is a slight taste of beer on the palate when you eat them. But they are good and moist and are holding up well in a Tupperware container on my counter. For the beer, I used River Horse Hipp O Lantern, but I’d imagine any pumpkin beer would do and if you don’t use a pumpkin beer, I’d up the pumpkin spice a tad (maybe 1.25 or 1.5 teaspoons total).

Oh, and for my Weight Watcher peeps, these came in at 3 points plus value – not bad at all!